‘Feeling Randy’: Reid Miller, Jonathan Silverman, Marguerite Moreau & Chris Mulkey Board Coming-Of-Age Comedy From Director Dean Lent

EXCLUSIVE: Soo Joo Park (Sense8), Brock O’Hurn (The Righteous Gemstones), Bella Thorne (Measure of Revenge), Laird Hamilton (Point Break) and Duke Nicholson (Us) are the latest additions to the cast of the dark comedy The Trainer, which Tony Kaye (American History X) is directing from a script by star Vito Schnabel and Jeff Solomon.

Lise Pedersen Swiss-based sales and distribution agency Lightdox has acquired world rights for “How to Save a Dead Friend,” the debut doc by Russian filmmaker Marusya Syroechkovskaya. Lightdox provided Variety exclusive access to the film’s trailer ahead of the film’s world premiere at Swiss doc film fest Visions du Réel next week.

Courtney Howard In a film that sings the praises of heavy metal music and reveres those who create it, “Metal Lords” stumbles in its ability to truly rock. Director Peter Sollett’s coming-of-age feature centered on two teen outcasts who form a hardcore metal band explores some fairly unexpected, dark recesses given its lighthearted, comedically-inclined premise. Sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll are on the set list, yet it plays too fast and loose, failing to achieve a good balance to make the chords reverberate louder.

Chris Rock was spotted in New York City on Tuesday amid a break in his current comedy tour. The comedian made a surprise appearance at the Comedy Cellar alongside Sam Morril, Judy Gold and Yamaneika Saunders, according to Page Six. Rock declined to talk about his Oscars drama with Will Smith.

John Hopewell Chief International CorrespondentThe latest from Belgium’s Eyeworks Film & TV Drama and director Wouter Bouvijn – who teamed on Canneseries hits “The Twelve” and “Red Light” – “1985,” sold by Studiocanal, works on multiple levels as a coming-of-age series.Two young Gendarmarie police recruits, Marc and Franky, and his sis Vicky, a law student and pirate radio DJ, move to Brussels. They are soon caught up in police corruption – insider drug trading, heavy fire arms robbery – and the rise of  the brutal Nijvel gang.Created by Willem Wallyn (“Albatros”), this is the coming-of-age story of three unbreakable friends loss of innocence, and that of a nation in its leaders.It is also an origins tale, of the forging of the modern age. Belgium’s distrust of its forces of law and order and political class rankles to this day, shared now with other countries, as does its politics of confrontation which Vicky denounces in an on-air monolog in Ep.

Chris Rock has made his first comments about the slap he endured by Will Smith during the 2022 Oscars over the weekend.

“CODA” has won best picture at the Oscars.

“When I really love someone, I don’t notice others,” utters Anais (Anais Demoustier) to her affair partner while laying in bed together. It’s ominous wording for what’s to come for the protagonist in writer/director Charline Bourgeois-Tacquet’s new romantic comedy Anais In Love. It is similar to Jochum Trier’s The Worst Person in the World, but while that film feels grounded, Anais has its head in the clouds. However, that isn’t a massive ding on the movie as the over-optimism is used to its advantage as the character breaks numerous boundaries and hearts in her quest to find the one person who will become her everything. 

Get ready for a whole lot of love coming from Netflix! The streaming service announced on Thursday its plans for a packed lineup of reality romance content, kicking off with renewing the hit series, “Love Is Blind”, for up to five seasons.

, for up to five seasons.Season 3 of the show, co-hosted by Nick and Vanessa Lachey, has already filmed and will be out this year. For another update on the season 2 cast after this month's reunion special, fans can tune into, which will premiere later this year. Seasons 4 and 5 are also on the lineup and will feature new singles in new cities around the country.

Vivienne Chow A wider representation of gender roles, more training opportunities for women filmmakers, and reaching out to women audiences are all ways forward to promote women-centric stories in Southeast Asian cinema, say women filmmakers from the region.The lively discussion involving Thai-American director Pailin Wedel (“Hope Frozen”), Indonesian actor Marissa Anita (“Ali & Ratu Ratu Queens”), Malaysian producer Lina Tan (“Sa Balik Baju”), and Filipino writer and producer Tanya Yuson (“Trese”) was staged by Netflix Asia on Wednesday.It concluded that streamers that can reach a wider audience online have already been making a positive impact on the industry as they help to find new audiences abroad, while also creating more opportunities for women filmmakers and diversity in storytelling. Works by the four panelists are all available on Netflix, which has been upping its game in Asia, particularly through its investment in local originals.Gender representation across Southeast Asia film and television content can vary widely.

A post shared by Rachel Rowland (@rachelrowland)“I’d like to say a photo bomb from Tom Hanks was the best part of yesterday but honestly I’d be lying. (No offense to the GOAT),” she wrote at the top of her post.

Newsweek. “You always have all of these plans and ideas for when you meet a celebrity and then when you do – especially national treasure Tom Hanks – you really become mush.

When The Worst Person in the World premiered in competition in Cannes this year there was the sense of an arrival, notably in the case of its leading lady, Renate Reinsve, who won the festival’s award for best actress. In actual fact, the film was closer to a destination, being the third part of an unofficial triptych begun by Norwegian director Joachim Trier with his 2006 feature debut Reprise, about two young bohemian writers living in Oslo. He followed it in 2011 with Oslo, August 31st, in which Reprise’s star, Anders Danielsen Lie, by day a successful medical doctor, played a melancholic drug addict and Reinsve made her acting debut with just one line of dialogue (“Let’s go to the party!”).

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic“The Prank” is no big whoop, but for a good stretch it’s a tartly written, engagingly nasty little comedy of high-school vengeance. It’s set during the senior year of Ben (Connor Kalopsis), the kind of eager, obsessive-compulsive overachiever who prints out several backup copies of his homework assignments, and Tanner (Ramona Young), a hacker, high on energy drinks, who’s his equally brainy but less responsible best friend. These two exist in their own unpopular cloistered geek space.

Tim Gray Senior Vice President“Audible,” an Oscar nominee for documentary short, features a winning combination: great filmmaking and a great subject matter.Director Matt Ogens had been waiting for 12 years to tell the story about the Maryland School for the Deaf and their championship football team. However, he doesn’t consider it a sports documentary: “It’s a coming-of-age story and some of it is unique, some of it is universal.”However, he had trouble getting funding: “We had a lot of doors shut in our faces by people thinking there wasn’t an audience for this.”During that time, Ogens would check in regularly with people at the school when he visited his family in the Maryland-D.C.

Elsa Keslassy International CorrespondentA testament to her fearless nature and boundless determination, Croatian-American filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović was nine months pregnant when she traveled from New York to present her feature debut “Murina” at the Cannes Film Festival.At the end of the festival, Kusijanović tool a 12-hour road trip with her husband to her homeland in Croatia, where she gave birth to her first child Petrus, right before scooping Cannes’ Golden Camera award with “Murina,” a double feast which earned her newborn son a lifetime festival accreditation.Eight months later, she sat with Variety to tell us how her life has changed since winning the coveted award and looked back at her journey getting there. Vibrant, bright, restless and forceful like her first feature “Murina,” Kusijanović hasn’t wasted any time.